2016-10-27

There is a Russian proverb “Ugovor dorozhe deneg” which means “Contractual agreement is more important than money”. Breaking a contract is a huge risk (reputational, financial, etc.) that is difficult to “pay back”. Also, having business with an unknown business party may be a high risk because of anti money laundering.

Blockchain (as the best, so far, records storage) provides integrity and traceability (see “Beauty of #blockchain - doveryai, no proveryai (trust but verify)” http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2016/10/beauty-of-blockchain-doveryai-no.html ). This is a mandatory component of digital contracts as enablers of the safe digital economy, but not sufficient one. Let us see in a few following scenarios what is missing yet for the trustful sharing of data and documents in digital business transactions within digital contracts.

Variant 1 - P2P anonymous

As simple as giving a few coins to a poor person.

Variant 2 - P2P with zero-knowledge proof

Transaction participants may verify that their counterparts are a real and respectable person. In case of problems with a transaction, its participants can be reveal by court’s request.

Variant 3 – simple B2B

Some documents (e.g. offer, payments, certificates of digital assets, etc.) must be exchanged between participants. Thus they must be managed properly within each transaction by specialised “chains” as docs-chain and assets-chain. Their lifecycles are bounded by the relevant transaction. Actually, they are temporary secured storages that may use the blockchain for storing digital hashes of their content (see also “Electronic Health Records ( #EHR ) implementation with #blockchain, #BPM, #ECM and #platform” http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2016/07/electronic-health-records-ehr.html ).

Variant 4 – B2B and partners

If the PartyB has a partner (PartnerB1) to produce PartyB’s goods then some documents from the PartnerB1 may be embedded (like a Russian doll) into the documents from the PartyB. In some cases, such documents may be anonymised.

To be able to run comprehensive monitoring and, potentially, some global optimisation, all the partners, all related data and all related documents must be in one secured storage of records, ideally, blockchain-based.

Conclusion

By looking at those variants, it is prudent to say that blockchain is only one of many serious issues to be addressed and architecture together to enables the digital economy. Fortunately, the current hype around blockchain is accelerating the better understanding of many things to be done together and, I hope, in well architected way.

2016-10-07

The aim of this document is to provide a big picture of voting with the use of various modern technologies, primarily #blockchain. This technology is ideal to implement the “doveryai, no proveryai” (trust but verify) principle to achieve the trust.

1 Basic concepts

Each vote sheet has its unique ID which has its address in the Voting BlockChain (VBC) as VBC-ref1, which also encoded as QR-code-1.

2 Remote voting through the Internet

A Registered Voter (RV) receives a Voting Sheet (VS) via a secured channel or in a secured envelope.

The RV using a Server-Less App (SLA) in his/her internet browser.

RV:

Opens the VS

Fills it

Hits the button “FILLED”

SLA:

Uploads the VS and some metadata into the VBC at VBC-ref1

Asks the VC to verify the voting results at VBC-ref1

RV:

Scans QR-code1 (e.g. mobile) to see the voting results at VBC-ref1 (optional)

Hits “OK” (and may save VBC-ref1)

SLA:

Starts a smart-contract to release VBC-ref1 to the voting authorities AFTER the ballot period is over